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I just read Dune for the first time, having never seen any of the other media but knowing a lot by pop cultural osmosis. It's good. I can see why it blew people's loving minds back in the day. It's much more internal, introspective, emotional, political and dour than I recall finding Asimov, which is the immediate comparison my brain makes. I have not read those books in a decade, and I enjoyed both for very different reasons. The intrigue was about power instead of logic and engineering. I vacillated on if I wanted to bother trying it since I've been just chewing through the Poirot books lately. I was in a circumstance where I couldn't have my e-reader and would badly need something to pass the time, so I borrowed a actual dead tree edition from my SO. I came into Dune somewhat without intending to do so, and I mention all that to ask: Is it worth reading the others? In my earlier indecision, I looked into it and came across the varied discourse and chatter: "Eh, just read Dune" "Read Dune and Dune Messiah" "Read the first four-five, what even is a chaptered house?" "Dune books turned me into a mentat, I snort 2 powdered novels a week and I named my son Anderson"
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May 8, 2024 22:15
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Read all six. The son is very bad.
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May 8, 2024 22:22
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Song of Achilles is fantastic. I’ve read a bunch of these Greek myths reinterpreted stories, and they mostly read like an author one day just read the Iliad and a few historical books and then wrote their own novel. Miller has lived and breathed these myths for decades, and it shows on every page. It’s not that her books are more accurate to the myths, it’s that she’s more able to bend and recolor the myths to suit her own needs and her own characters. The result is a story that feels more true to the old works than a more strictly accurate retelling could ever approach. Also, almost every other author will always decide to edit out the Gods, to make it “more realistic.” Miller doesn’t.
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May 8, 2024 22:40
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The gods are present in Haynes' work but all the women got colour and depth and all the dudes are childish arseholes. Again, Greek gods, so...
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May 8, 2024 22:49
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Magnetic North posted:I just read Dune for the first time, having never seen any of the other media but knowing a lot by pop cultural osmosis. The common recommendation I've seen here regarding Dune is to keep reading until you find it lame, then stop; it will not improve for you after that point. Different people locate that point in different places. Some stop after the first book. The second book (Messiah) is kind of a coda to the first, so some stop after that one. The only thing I really get out of the third book (Children) is the link between Paul's story and book 4, God Emperor of Dune. Book 4 is crazy as hell and I think it's worth a read because it manages to be both pretty good and also way far out there; some people (me) stop there. After book 4 the wildness intensifies and no doubt someone else has useful input on those books. I've never heard anything good about anything the son has written.
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May 8, 2024 23:08
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Magnetic North posted:Is it worth reading the others? In my earlier indecision, I looked into it and came across the varied discourse and chatter: Everyone has a different breaking point with Dune. Keep reading them until: a) you roll your eyes and throw the book across the room (or wish you could but it's a phone or an e-reader or you collect delicate ornaments) b) you find yourself about to open a book with the word "Brian" on the cover Or, if reading worse books in the same series will tarnish your feelings about Dune, quit while you're ahead e: that'll teach me to overthink a post
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May 8, 2024 23:12
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Magnetic North posted:I just read Dune for the first time, having never seen any of the other media but knowing a lot by pop cultural osmosis. There's been some dissing of Dune (the book) lately, with various people saying it wasn't that / Frank Herbert was a bad author or too white or too male or something. All of which misses the time that Dune came out and what other SF looked like then. Dune is a set of non American cultures, political, religious, and has only some vague mentions of Earth. People don't save the day with a convenient piece of tech or science. It must have been a shock.
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May 9, 2024 13:35
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Monica Bellucci posted:In theory The Thorn of Emberlain comes out soon(ish). Who's been telling you this? It's been four years since the last missed publication date.
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May 9, 2024 14:22
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nonathlon posted:There's been some dissing of Dune (the book) lately, with various people saying it wasn't that / Frank Herbert was a bad author or too white or too male or something. All of which misses the time that Dune came out and what other SF looked like then. Dune is a set of non American cultures, political, religious, and has only some vague mentions of Earth. People don't save the day with a convenient piece of tech or science. It must have been a shock. Yeah it’s like the critique of Tolkien being racist because he essentializes race. Like all goblins are evil, all elves are beautiful, benevolent and aloof, etc. it kind of only makes sense if you don’t read what Tolkien read. That’s not to say that the work isn’t problematic, it’s just not a very interesting analysis without taking account of the author’s context.
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May 9, 2024 19:57
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nonathlon posted:There's been some dissing of Dune (the book) lately, with various people saying it wasn't that / Frank Herbert was a bad author or too white or too male or something. To be fair to the haters, I was getting a tiny bit of those vibes reading it in 2024 too. The Fremen are maybe a little 'noble savages with odd ways that work' (kinda reminded me of a Bizzaro Heinlein as I read it) and the women characters are maybe a little 'bioessentialist eugenicists but with stern misunderstood power that works' but it was nothing beyond what you could chalk up to 'when it was written'. Also, having the Baron be (cw: bad stuff) a homosexual rapist is a choice.
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May 10, 2024 11:23
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The Music of Chance by Paul Auster. It's a short absurdist novel about a guy whose life is slowly falling apart. Even when things start to look up it always leaves him worse off in the end. The main plot is him getting stuck in a Kafkaesque debt trap, trying to earn his way out by building an enormous wall from the stones of a dismantled castle. I liked this a lot as an image, but the actual writing was never sharp enough to satisfy. Felt like it should have been made more weird, or more bleak, or more funny somehow.
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May 10, 2024 15:22
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All of Auster's works are like that
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May 10, 2024 15:25
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There's a good movie with Mandy Patinkin and James Spader.
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May 10, 2024 15:28
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Yeah I want to see that now. The feeling I had reading it was similar to reading an unproduced screenplay -- like oh yeah, this has promise and I can definitely see how it could be good at some later stage of polish.
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May 10, 2024 15:47
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 I think I'd rather have seen it. I guess the problem is there's no twist because it get LotRed every time it's spoken of.
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May 11, 2024 16:03
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Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica A dystopian horror novel in which the world has been transformed by a virus that has made all animals poisonous to humans. Society has gone through the "Transition" whereby consumption of human meat is normalized and codified. An entire industry has been born out of the raising and slaughtering of humans for consumption. The main character, Marcos, works for a human meat processing plant and through a series personal tragedies has recently become disillusioned with his role in the world. This book was brutal. It broke me at a couple points. I really enjoyed it, but it was tough to get through at some points because of its disregard for humanity. 
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May 12, 2024 04:19
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Total Party Kill posted:This book was brutal. It broke me at a couple points. I really enjoyed it, but it was tough to get through at some points because of its disregard for humanity. It's really fascinating to see how different different people's takeaways of this book are. I didn't think it had a disregard of humanity as much as it pointed out how horribly, desperately people will cling to the things they feel entitled to (even when they obviously are not entitled to them). And by extension I couldn't help reading it as an indictment of the current-day meat industry. I also really enjoyed it for as gnarly as it was. For what I just finished, it was The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera. It's a fantasy novel set in the modern day (so it has slight urban fantasy/magical realism vibes but not really exactly that?) about the son of a sort of religious/cult leader who is trained by his (also supernaturally/spiritually gifted) mother to be an assassin in a fight against his father. But that's just the intro! Most of the book is about him as an adult, moving away to a large city, befriending other 'almost chosen' people (this world is lousy with supernatural religious figures and their family members), and confronting the legacy his parents left him with. It's also about having to exist in a classist, caste-ist, religious-fascist state. That's a lot, but it's got a lot more going on than just saying "it's a sort of modern-set fantasy book" would get across. And it's really good. I don't usually go for fantasy in modern settings, even when it's more-or-less secondary, but this one has got the goods.
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May 12, 2024 14:26
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Strong Female Character by Fern Brady. Fern Brady is a comedienne from Scotland, near Edinburgh. That is a sentence she would hate. This book is about Fern and how not being diagnosed with autism for most of her life hosed up quite a lot of it. Throughout most of her life, she felt off and behaved in ways that baffled her. Everybody ignored her and her Mum just assumed she was evil. Yeah. Being a voracious reader she sought some answers and thought she had autism since she was, Iunno, 14ish? Her doctor dismissed her as she had a boyfriend and made eye contact. She ended up in an institution that was worse than useless, actively unhelpful. She acted out without understanding most of her behaviour. She sought help and was treated like poo poo and people ignored her except for when they told her she was wrong. Repeat for 20+ years until a couple of years ago, she got a diagnosis (autism) and a therapist who was good with female autistic people. Despite the triteness of the basic outline of her story, this is a good book and full of righteous anger. No-one listened, for decades. As someone who tends to get outright ignored by a lot of my family, that one burns to the core. If you've never experienced it, don't try and don't sympathize, just say you don't know what it's like. Everything else ends up condescending horseshit where you insist I listen to you and agree with what you think. gently caress off. gently caress right off. No, further, all the way off. Keep going. This is a good book and Fern, like most ASD people, applies the blunt hammer of logic and bafflement at non-rational behaviour, all the while being told she should tell stories about herself that are cautionary tales and she hopes her story will stop people from making the same mistakes. People always ignore what she said in favour of what they want and blame her when she kicks up. I could go on but it is that pretty much again and again and again and again. I was very surprised how much I liked this book. I'm not gonna say it's changed my life or anything but, Jesus, all the being ignored stuff, well, "I'm in this picture and I don't like it.gif" Ignore shitlibs extolling the virtues of the book, if they read it they ignored (There it is again) Fern's cellular loathing of such people, which she makes blatantly and abjectly clear throughout the book. It's just over a quick read and may very well have a follow up a few years from now but I would recommend a read. If you think it might be good for someone on the ZX-81, read it first and don't be one of the many fuckheads who point out to Fern that "You don't look autistic!"
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May 12, 2024 21:17
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Total Party Kill posted:Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica Weird, there is no kindle version of this. There is, however, "Tender is the Flesh: The dystopian cannibal horror everyone is talking about! Tiktok made me buy it!" by Agustina Bazterrica.
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May 12, 2024 21:39
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The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard Every time I try to read Gravity’s Rainbow I’m put off by the manic humor, so I was really pleased by how unrelentingly dry this is. I have to imagine that Peter Greenaway must have been massively influenced by this book, particularly in The Falls but also Zed, which obviously features a car crash but also an exploration of alternative sexuality. I definitely struggled to keep up in a few places but the overall impact is huge, and I opted to take it all at face value, which I think is more fun than questioning the veracity of the narrative. The Ronald Reagan chapter is obviously great but I was particularly taken with the various ways that geometry, violence, and sex are linked together. Launching an opposition in a war by putting up huge billboards all over the city that each document a few inches of a woman’s body is the kind of mindbending stuff I love. Everyone should keep a copy of this book next to the toilet.
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May 12, 2024 22:12
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Magic Hate Ball posted:The Atrocity Exhibition by JG Ballard Did you get the one with the illustrations or the non-illustrated? A sci-fi lit professor in college had this as one of the books he assigned and the book store sold the illustrated copy. It was... an experience. Even the paper of the book had an off-putting smell, let alone the pictures of a cervix with progressive stages of cancer. Or longitudinally bisected blow job. Or post-sexual assault traumatized anus layered over car exhaust (I can't remember if there was an actual picture for that one or if was just talked about in the part with the guy who wants to sexually assault a car). Anyway, I used to leave the illustrated copy out when family came to visit so they would learn to leave my poo poo alone, but I gave it to a friend because I forgot to give him a Christmas present and had very little on hand at the time. Since then I've ordered two copies, but both were the versions without illustrations (lousy lying Amazon sellers) and I'd love to find an illustrated copy. I especially love the little blurb on the back about the book's original title Blood and Napalm: export America and the mention that the original publisher incinerated all of the original copies. Not sure if that was true or not, but it sounds plausible. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 22:29 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 22:23
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The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle An immaculately crafted fairy tale about a creature of perfect, eternal beauty, and how easy it is for flawed mortals like humans to fixate on something like her, to dwell on what they can't have and let perfectly attainable joy pass them by. All of the metaphors hit and feel very deliberate, and it has small moments of wit and cleverness without overdoing it and trying too hard to impress the reader. The curse placed on the town of Hagsgate is my personal favorite part of the book; it's some real Omelas poo poo that hits far closer to home than I was expecting. I've seen plenty of complaints from curmudgeons about how gamified and commercialized fantasy stories have gotten in recent years, and this book feels like an ideal example of what those people wish more of the genre was like. I recommend this to everyone interested in the genre, even people who don't like those curmudgeons.
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May 13, 2024 20:25
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Ithle01 posted:Did you get the one with the illustrations or the non-illustrated? A sci-fi lit professor in college had this as one of the books he assigned and the book store sold the illustrated copy. It was... an experience. Even the paper of the book had an off-putting smell, let alone the pictures of a cervix with progressive stages of cancer. Or longitudinally bisected blow job. Or post-sexual assault traumatized anus layered over car exhaust (I can't remember if there was an actual picture for that one or if was just talked about in the part with the guy who wants to sexually assault a car). I didn't even know there was an illustrated version! That sounds like a blast. The copy I got from the library was the annotated version from 2002, which was very interesting. Ballard closes each chapter with notes on certain references in each segment and has some fun anecdotes about the work post-publishing. My favorite was that the Ronald Reagan story was apparently circulated at the 1980 conservative convention as if it were a real report from some crackpot think tank, and was taken at face value as such.
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May 13, 2024 21:53
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I didn't even know there was an illustrated version! That sounds like a blast. The copy I got from the library was the annotated version from 2002, which was very interesting. Ballard closes each chapter with notes on certain references in each segment and has some fun anecdotes about the work post-publishing. My favorite was that the Ronald Reagan story was apparently circulated at the 1980 conservative convention as if it were a real report from some crackpot think tank, and was taken at face value as such. Okay, so I looked into this. By which I mean I spent 10 minutes on Google. I ordered a copy in 2010 from Amazon and it was not what I wanted. My original, now lost, version was printed by ReSearch Publishing in 1990 and it is hard to find. I somehow bought a copy in 2001 because my sci-fi lit professor was a straight up mad man (only real class I ever got an A). The cover has a picture of a 'visible woman' sort of model and the illustrations are by Phoebe Gloeckner and Ana Barrado. After a short internet search, it looks like Ballard approved of the illustrations, but they weren't in the original and they also weren't in many of the reprints because they aren't part of the original book. However, if you find one I highly recommend checking it out. I guess my only hope is if the book store off campus at PennState that sold me my copy still exists 20+ years later and if I have time to do a trek out there this Summer. Also, Why I Want to gently caress Ronald Reagan appears to be the reason why the original printing of The Atrocity Exhibition got pulped by the publisher by court order.
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May 14, 2024 00:23
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A Year At the Movies - Kevin Murphy. Equally funny (the smuggling an entire Thanksgiving dinner into a movie was a highlight) and poignant. Kevin has a lot of interesting things to say about the state of cinema and the movie industry, and although the book came out in 2001, a lot of it is still very relevant today, even though we're in the middle (?) of a movie theater die-off in the wake of covid. A pleasant, easy read from cover to cover. Reaganland - Rick Perlstein. I was born in early spring 1984 in a world that was created within the pages of this book. I thought I knew a lot of common facts about Carter - "malaise", the gas and Iranian hostage crises, "there you go again" - but Perlstein educated me on a lot of things I did not know (e.g: the fact that Carter was successfully painted as "mean" by the Reagan campaign for going negative, a problem Carter in part created for himself by positioning himself as 'above the fray' in 1976). Sometimes, like the rise of the """Religious Right""" and the botched prosecution of the guy who assassinated Milk, reading Reaganland was painful. The closer I got to 1980, the ways in which everything went to hell at once and Carter stepped on rake after rake became almost exhilarating to read (not that I'm any fan of Reagan, but I knew what the outcome was going to be anyway). As an "elder Millennial" I'm a "beneficiary of Reaganism in ways I consider to be overwhelmingly negative: no doubt a straight line can be drawn from Carter/Reagan's deregulatory push to 2008, and no doubt our meddling and machinations in the Middle East was a pretty direct cause of 9/11. If you're interested in reading about the origins of a lot of today's politics, or the S.O.P dirty tricks that were pioneered in Campaign '80, I can't recommend this book enough. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 01:19 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 01:13
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:Reaganland - Rick Perlstein. I was born in early spring 1984 in a world that was created within the pages of this book. I thought I knew a lot of common facts about Carter - "malaise", the gas and Iranian hostage crises, "there you go again" - but Perlstein educated me on a lot of things I did not know (e.g: the fact that Carter was successfully painted as "mean" by the Reagan campaign for going negative, a problem Carter in part created for himself by positioning himself as 'above the fray' in 1976). All of Perlstein's books on the rise of the modern right wing -- Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland -- are well worth reading.
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May 14, 2024 01:29
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Extremely tough to read though
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May 14, 2024 01:39
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Selachian posted:All of Perlstein's books on the rise of the modern right wing -- Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland -- are well worth reading. The only one I haven't read is Before the Storm, but the other three - Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland are all excellent. I'm slightly surprised that Perlstein hasn't done a Nixonland style book on Reagan's presidency, which I barely remember but undoubtedly had a lot of  moments.e: One thing I found most interesting about Reaganland is how Perlstein subtly burst the legend of Reagan's 1980 campaign. Yes, he was a flim-flam man of the highest order with had charisma to burn who was running against a (then) historically unpopular, besieged incumbent. It wasn't Reagan's oratory that got him through, though; it was his rotten "Moral Majority" friends and a whole parcel of dirty tricks (e.g: sensitive Carter documents being leaked to the Reagan campaign). Say what you will about Carter, but his tireless efforts to bring the Iran hostages back even after he had already lost badly to Reagan, spoke well of his character. Reagan and his people successfully set the press up to view any progress made on bringing the hostages home as an "October surprise", which undercut Carter's honest good-faith in negotiating with Iran. Perlstein considers it "unsubstantiated", but I can fully believe that Reagan and/or his people deliberately hobbled diplomatic efforts so that they could get their made-for-TV moment when the hostages were released just as Reagan was inaugurated. That was the kind of stunt directly from Reagan's demagogic playbook. F_Shit_Fitzgerald fucked around with this message at 02:13 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 02:02
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:The only one I haven't read is Before the Storm, but the other three - Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland are all excellent. I'm slightly surprised that Perlstein hasn't done a Nixonland style book on Reagan's presidency, which I barely remember but undoubtedly had a lot of I wouldn't be surprised if he's working on something like that. In the meantime, I can once again recommend Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor as an (admittedly biased) history of the Reagan era. You can get it as a pay-what-you-want ebook here, although the print version -- which has photos -- is available used for two bucks and up on Alibris.
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May 14, 2024 02:16
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Wrapped The Godfather. It was pretty good. Hard to evaluate objectively after watching the movie since every scene conjures images of the film. The segments that didn't make it into the movie (like the lengthy digression into the finer points of pelvic floor surgery) were fun.
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May 14, 2024 02:17
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People mention that Perlstein does a fair bit of pop cultural analysis - does he have any interesting thoughts on the movies of the period?
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May 14, 2024 06:31
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The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson. Do you like vikings? Do you like vikings viking around being metal as gently caress? This is absolutely the book for you.
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May 14, 2024 20:55
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Monica Bellucci posted:This is absolutely the book for you. Seconding this.
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May 14, 2024 21:07
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approximately what percentage of the work do the vikings spend in their boats?
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May 14, 2024 23:53
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3 tours including a forced oarsmen set up from the start that takes a few years. Also fighting at sea happens on a few occasions including dastardly vikings trying to take rightful plunder. If you can think "Boy, I'd love it if they had a scene where vikings _________, there's at least one and you will go gently caress YEAH! This is the Fury Road of Viking.
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May 15, 2024 00:07
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Oh, also there's a bit involving a broom that was, for me, the  of metal as gently caress moments.
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May 15, 2024 21:46
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I think my favorite part is the Viking poetry. Specifically, the fact the mighty warrior-poets have to hide away in a corner muttering to themselves before coming up with their witty remarks.
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May 15, 2024 22:21
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My translation rarely rhymed.  FYI, A version of kenning still happens here in Ireland. In the modern era, we call it slagging and we appreciate a well-thought out and delivered insult. Language play and quick wit is a very Irish thing.
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May 15, 2024 22:27
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